View full sizeFiber optic cable at Chattanooga power company epb's control center. (Lee Roop/LRoop@al.com)

HUNTSVILLE, Alabama - Huntsville Utilities will ask the City Council tonight to approve spending almost $50,000 on a consultant to help it decide whether to build a high-speed, fiber-optic Internet network. The Chattanooga, Tenn., area already has a network that can deliver 1 Gigabit per second data speed to any address in the parts of 9 counties and 13 cities it serves. It also provides fiber-optic TV and telephone service.

It made sense to Chattanooga to run the fiber cable itself for the improvements it would gain to its electrical grid. Those are spelled out in No. 2 below. But Chattanooga's power company, epb, went further than Huntsville Utilities has to go. Huntsville could run the cable and lease it to service providers. It could partner with service providers. And it can go all the way and become a service provider as epb has done.

2. The benefits to the electric grid are a reason to go forward.

Colman Keane, epb's director of fiber optics says the costs of power outages go beyond the cost of fixing them. "It's the hamburgers Burger King didn't sell while the lights were out," he says.

Building a network that lets computers route power around outages in seconds, pinpoint the exact site of the failure, dispatch service trucks, downsize transformers and other equipment to meet realistic needs, and catch power thieves will save epb millions, Keane believes. He says more people come to Chattanooga to study the electric grid than high-speed Internet, and most are from other countries where power system efficiency is already critical.

3. If Huntsville Utilities becomes a service provider, it will find high-speed home Triple-Play service (telephone, television and Internet) complicated, but necessary.

"In today's marketplace," Keane says, "it's the power of the bundle that determines the 'take' rate." Translation: You need to offer consumers all three to entice them to subscribe to your network.

In practical terms for epb, this has meant a large infrastructure of servers, storage and antennas that must be maintained around the clock by a team of software engineers and technicians. Chattanooga measures in hundreds of terabits the storage it needs just to provide video-on-demand, and that's just one small piece of the puzzle. Overall, Keane says employment hasn't increased dramatically, but it has increased.

4. A GIG isn't necessarily a GIG.

Chattanooga has fiber cable capable of carrying a GIG of data to and from your house in a second, but in the digital world there's more to it. If you have an old router, or the company you are communicating with on the other end has slower Internet capability, you won't get GIG speed. That's not to say your Internet won't be faster, or that adjustments won't make it faster still, but speed is complicated.

5. To make high-speed happen, Huntsville needs champions more than consultants.

What communities or public utilities really need to make high-speed work is a group of insiders in government or at the utility company dedicated to making it happen. Without that enthusiasm, Chattanooga's fiber network expert says it won't happen.

6. Don't fear a legal fight with Internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T and WOW.

Companies like these can be a challenge – they delayed Chattanooga's project two years in court – but Keane says flatly, "If they (sue), they won't win." He advises asking the big players to provide the service first. If they won't do it, he says, it's hard to claim the public utility has taken business from them.

7. Big business will probably play – and pay.

Chattanooga calls some of its local and regional business partners "co-los," which is short for "co-located." Big data companies like the medical, legal and financial industries have brought huge servers to Chattanooga's facilities and hooked them directly to the power and Internet grid. They pay for that privilege.